Interpol – El Pintor

Interpol’s first album, Turn On The Bright Lights, was a masterpiece. It was the sort of moody rock that drags you into a musical ocean, falling to the depths with Stella, who’s always down. The albums that followed couldn’t capture the unique sound they nailed first time round. Starting to get stale, the band lost, playing away into obscurity, they awoke one day and decided that it was time to go back to the basics. A fresh start cut down to three members. El Pintor would surely be the one.

El Pintor is a collection of melancholy rock songs, which sound just like the rest that’s been before. The drumming sounds a little happier, the singer sounds a little brighter, but it’s all the same to me. There are no stand out moments, yet no bum notes. It’s sounds like Interpol of old, but it sounds like an Interpol trying to be of old. Are they trying to say anything new? Try something new? Nothing, it’s just a replay with the core message of the album being ‘they liked us back then, let’s try to be like then.’ A return to form without the charm.

The music is anything but bad here, but when it brushes against Turn On The Bright Lights so closely, why not just listen to that stellar record? Each track starts with a hopeful fresh feeling, but they all end up the the same once the chorus rears it’s repetitive head. El Pintor feels like music for the sake of music, a band too uncertain of themselves to truly grip the sound they have and explore the depths of it. To fully understand that El Pintor is more of the same is probably the best way to enjoy it. Maybe now that they’ve gone back to basics and found their feet, Interpol can look into the future for album number six.